Healthcare News

Hospitals are turning to mHealth to help their clinicians reduce alarm fatigue, keep up to date on patient needs and collaborate instantly with the care team.

According to a 2013 study by the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN), 72 percent to 99 percent of clinical alarms are false. One East Coast hospital reported more than 59,000 alarm conditions over a 12-day period.

The fatigue this creates among clinicians is a serious issue that impacts productivity, job satisfaction and, most importantly, patient safety. When a nurse is spending valuable time responding to a false alarm, this simultaneously takes that nurse away from real and critical patient care needs.

According to a report the Brookings Institute issued in May 2016, 23% of all data breaches occur in the healthcare industry. Nearly 90% of healthcare organizations had some sort of data breach between 2013 and 2015, costing the industry $6.2 billion.

Why is healthcare data so vulnerable? Because it is so valuable. It contains a wide range of identifying information, including social security numbers, birthdates and home addresses. Unlike credit card information, much of this information is constant and can’t be changed. In addition, it’s information that’s kept across a number of years and increasingly shared across different entities.

The way the meaningful use program was structured was more about the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and not interoperability, and so the US health system has grown into many different EHR systems that cannot talk to one another, explained Doug Fridsma, MD, PhD, president and CEO of the American Medical Informatics Association, at the Annual Meeting of the Pharmacy Quality Alliance.

After the program was created, the country went from a 17% adoption rate to well over 90% in academic centers and close to it in smaller practices, he said. Health information technology (IT) should be looked at as an ultra large scale system because the EHRs and systems are out there but they still need to be able to exchange information.

“Ultra large scale systems are always going to be de-centrally controlled,” Fridsma said. “We really have to think about this as pharmacists and nurses and doctors all working together.” And at the center of the system is the patient.

For athletes, competitors and data geeks, the opportunities to improve our health through personal data collection have never been more prevalent and affordable.

I use Fitbit religiously to track my steps, heart rate and sleep patterns.

I combine Fitbit with data from MapMyRun and MapMyRide, apps that collect running and biking data from geo-location info in my smartphone.

In the past I’ve used NikeID, which communicates with a chip inside my sneakers to track my run data.

Confession: I once attended a digital media conference and entered a contest to log the most steps on the conference floor. I tied my step-counting device to my ceiling fan and let it go all night.

For some, there is concern that personal health data can be hacked, stolen, or exploited for marketing purposes without consent.

For those of us in the digital advertising sector, we have a responsibility to be clear about where our data comes from, consumer protection laws, as well as the benefits of advancing our health through data collection.

Given this, below is a brief summary of how personal body data is being collected, protected, and used in the digital advertising sector today.

In efforts to promote healthcare transparency, CMS published a list of payments made to physicians and teaching hospitals in 2015 from healthcare stakeholders.

Healthcare vendors and manufacturers have spent $7.52 billion in payments and ownership and investment interests to providers and teaching hospitals in 2015, according to a press release from CMS.

The agency published the payment data from healthcare manufacturers as part of its Open Payments Program, which shares transfers of value from some healthcare stakeholders, including drugs, devices, biologicals, and medical supplies manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals.